Israel has long been threatened by Hezbollah’s short-ranged missiles, but now Iran is stepping up the threat, both from its own long-range ballistic missiles and from its proxies in Syria. In response, Israel is pressing to build a multi-layered missile defense with its Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, Iron Dome and David’s Sling anti-missile systems.…
By Arie EgoziMillennium Space Systems is delivering on critical missile tracking constellation
With programs like MTC, Millennium Space Systems is redefining what it means to be an operational prime – rapidly delivering operational small sat constellations on rapid timelines.
WASHINGTON: “When I was an ensign, a lieutenant, we knew we could beat the Russians. It was just a question of time because we were better than them,” NATO’s top admiral said. “I’m not sure we could make that assumption now.” The European allies suffer many shortfalls at sea, said Vice Adm. Clive Johnstone, the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: NATO troops will stand and fight if Russia attacks the Baltic States or Poland, Maj. Gen. William Hickman said last week. The prospect of combat — like that of being hanged — has concentrated NATO’s mind, changing plans, training, and future tactics. “There are US troops, French, British troops in these countries, standing tall,”…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: The concept called Multi-Domain Battle – a single seamless offensive across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace – may seem futuristic, but the Army wants to start implementing at least parts of it right now. In wargames, doctrine, and interservice dialogue, “it’s actually becoming reality,” said Gen. David Perkins. As one of the fathers…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The military’s top generals have called Russia the number one threat. The incoming administration doesn’t seem convinced that Russia is a threat at all, with Trump himself speaking warmly of Vladimir Putin and dimly of NATO allies. But whatever Putin’s intentions for the future, Russia has proved what its capabilities are in Estonia in 2007,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The multinational Unmanned Warrior exercise off the coast of Scotland is doing “really groundbreaking” work on naval drones, said one participating US scientist. There’ve been “a number of world firsts” in networking unmanned vehicles of different types and from different nations into a single unit, Marcus Tepaske, science advisor for the Office of Naval Research,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: War time is a bad time to run out of gas. If there was a crisis with Russia today, and a German unit needed to refuel from a US Army pump, they couldn’t do it. Why? The goddamn nozzle doesn’t fit. It’s just one of the host of seemingly minor shortfalls, from pontoon bridges to…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
BAE Systems’ LR-PGK: The Superior Anti-Jam Solution
Going the distance to defeat emerging jam threats.
At the annual Ssang Yong wargames, US Marines and their South Korean counterparts are testing a small gadget that could solve a big problem: incompatible radios. Getting different networks to connect is hard enough between the Marine Corps and the US Navy, the Army and the Air Force, but multi-national operations are chronically plagued by…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
RESTON, VA: US command and control networks take too long to link to allies and respond to Russia’s rapid-fire aggression. In Ukraine, “we’ve had at least two, maybe three of these cycles [already, where] they’ll back off, and there’ll be a long kind of quiet period, and then they’ll spike back up,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: At a recent wargame in Germany, slow communications between the US and an allied unit meant we would have killed our own allies. We saw “what happens when we don’t get it right” the Army Vice-Chief of Staff said last week. When an allied unit called for artillery support, Gen. Daniel Allyn said that “by the time that…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
ABOARD THE USS ARLINGTON: 17 warships and two submarines. Thousands of personnel from 19 countries. Billions of dollars of high-tech hardware. Months of planning. But sometimes you still have to improvise. When US and Dutch warships and marines united in an international task force for the 2014 Bold Alligator wargames off Virginia, the two countries could…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union has taken the unprecedented step of adopting a standard for the Internet that would essentially permit eavesdropping on a global basis. According to a just-published piece on the RT.com web site, ITU members decided to adopt a standard, known as Y.2770, which would permit the inspection of Internet traffic.…
By Wyatt KashNATIONAL HARBOR: Last year’s Libya campaign revealed painful shortfalls in NATO, including intelligence sharing so molasses-slow that French pilots gave up on waiting for target data from US Predator drones. That’s something the allies are anxious to correct. “In Libya we got away with it. We made do, we had work-arounds, [but] we were not…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Crafting A Pacific Attack & Defense Enterprise: The Strategic Quadrangle
The pivot to the Pacific started more than a century ago. The United States first became a Pacific power in 1898, the year the US first annexed Hawaii and then gained Guam and the Philippines (as well as Puerto Rico) from Spain after a “short, victorious war.” The United States is at a turning point…
By Robbin Laird